Professional Documents
Culture Documents
661
Michael L. Ray
Rajeev Batra**
September 1982
* Financial support for this project was provided in part by the Marketing
Management Program of the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
and in part by the Marketing Science Institute.
Emotion and persuasion is an old topic in psychology People ~ ~ greater attention to affective
and a difficult one to apply to advertising. Affect advertising. Affect tends to play a prominent role
appears to have four possible effects on “learning” from in models of attention and perception. Ittelson
advertising and a direct effect on advertising effect- (1973, p. 16) asserts that “the first level of response
iveness in low depth—of—processing situations. But to the environment is affective. The direct emotional
understanding and measurement of the cognitive neuro— impact of the situation, perhaps largely a global
psychological underpinnings of the effect of affect is response to the ambiance, very generally governs the
inconplete and often applied in an oversimplistic way. directions taken by subsequent relations with the envi-
ronment”. Posner and Snyder (1975) quote work by
Erdelyi and Applebaum on the priority of emotional
Introduction identification over semantic identification in the
formation of perceptual context.
An inadequate understanding of the role of affect in
advertising has probably been the cause of more wasted Broadbent (1977), too, finds an “emotionality effect”
advertising money than any other single reason. Today, in his hierarchical model of information handling:
after years of advertising research, we still do not words that have emotional content are perceived more
adequately understand if advertising must entertain in readily than those which don’t. And, most recently,
order to sell or whether, like the headache ads that Bower and Cohen (1982) present evidence that a person’s
seem to sell through their very irritation, pleasantness feelings act like a selective filter that is tuned to
is irrelevant to considerations of advertising effect- incoming material that supports or justifies those
iveness. One could easily modify John Wanamaker’s com- feelings; the filter lets in material congruent with
plaint: we know that half of our advertising is wasted, the mood of the perceiver, but ignores or casts aside
but we don’t know if it’s the ~“affective”half or the incongruent material.
“rational” half.
People must pay at least minimal (attention to adver-
Things seem to be changing, though. Recently, cracks tising for it to have any effect, no matter what the
seem to have developed in the edifice of the Fishbein— relevant hierarchy of effects. And affective adver-
ian “attitudes are based on attributes” school of brand tising should prove to be more effective in getting
superiority. We academic researchers may yet undetstand such attention (e.g. Ray 1977, 374).
why advertising personnel have for long intuitively sus-
pected that consumers develop a liking for brands based Affect enhance the degree of processing. Kroeber—
at least partly, and at least in some situations, on how Riel (1979) argues that the degree of information
affective that brand’s advertising is (Vaughn 1980; processing for a message is a function of the degree
Berger 1980). to which the message evokes arousal, or phasic activa-
tion. His experiments showed higher levels of informa-
In this review paper, we first examine the various tion acquisition and information retention for messages
reasons why, according to the literature, we need to evoking higher activation levels~but were criticized
study affect at all, and why affect is importañt for ad- on conceptual and methodological grounds by Ryan (1980).
vertising theory and practice. In doing so, we first
consider the role of affect in advertising as a mediat- Kahneman (1973) similarly argued for a relationship
ing, instrumental factor in advertising success; we then between activation (~“effort”) and performance; all
look at reasons why the creation of affect may be impor- such relationships have a well—known inverted—U shaped
tant as an end in itself. Next, we discuss ways in relationship, however, since performance becomes
which advertising—induced affect may be studied, and in Impaired at excessively high levels of arousal. Evi-
order to do this we attempt to understand what the dence of such relationships is also found in the fear
sources of affect are, and what it really means for literature (Ray and Wilkie 1970).
people to experience affect. This section is heavily
psychophysiological in tone. Finally, we raise ques- Arguing from a learning theory perspective,~Ray (1973,
tions on where we go from here, summarizing what we do 1982, Ch. 10) argues that advertising should use
know, and some urgent questions, about affect in adver— affective executions in those situations where the level
tising. of “natural drive” In the situation is otherwise low,
to add to such drive to facilitate learning.
The Role of Affect in Advertising And from yet another perspective, one could argue that
since affective advertising executions are more likely
Affect as a Means to an End to use visual imagery than less affective executions,
such affective executions will evoke greater processing
There are at least four reasons why affective adverti- because of the ue of the visual sensory stores and
sing may prove to be more effective advertising, no Image processing channels in addition to the verbal
matter what the content or situation (subject to a few channels (Paivio 1978).
,
One may, at this point, legitimately ask what all of short—lived. Further research on this question is
this has to do with advertising or consumer behavior. warranted as well.
We believe that our brief review of the psychobiological
literature makes a few simple, but important, points.
References
First, we must, in trying to understand the nature and
sources of affect, avoid simplistic, facile generaliza- Bagozzi, R.P. (1981), “An Examination of the Validity
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York University, June.
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